>>1311966I own one of these, and a number of other bikes that I ride roughly as much as I ride my ebike.
Let me address your concerns. First of all, when riding a pedal-assist ebike you are still very much able to put in as much effort as you are willing or able. Depending on what you are trying to do, this might mean that you turn off the motor or keep the assist level very low to max out your range. Or you might crank it up and go for your 1-hour PB.
The thing is, normies absolutely do not have the fitness or handling skills to ride a bicycle at 25mph for long or even short periods of time. Normies just want their ride to be "comfortable". This automatically excludes any ride longer than, say, an hour.
The dirty little secret of e-bikes is that they are still only really useful to actual cyclists. Normies will latch on to them and get some extra utility/fun, but pedal-assist will never really be good enough for them; saddles and handlebars will never really be good enough for them.
>There's no vanity benefit to cycling. It doesn't make your body look good. Then e-bikes offer a benefit to people who are training for vanity; you can get exactly the amount and intensity of cardio that you want to, regardless of where, when, and how much you ride.
From a pure stravawatts standpoint, I definitely had a noteworthy downtick in raw performance during my first season on an e-bike; I suffered a stress-injury because I was able to double my monthly mileage literally over night.
